Crittenden and Co-authors Win ES&T Best Paper Award

The American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology Engineering has announced that they are awarding a “Best Paper Award” for 2021 to John Crittenden and co-authors Jinming Luo, Deyou Yu, Kiril D. Hristovski, Kaixing Fu, Yanwen Shen, and Paul Westerhoff for their article “Review of Advances in Engineering Nanomaterial Adsorbents for Metal Removal and Recovery from Water: Synthesis and Microstructure Impacts.” The article was first published online on March 12, 2021 for the April 20th print edition of ACS ES&T.

The paper presents the possible approaches to create novel adsorbents that can be used to recover strategically important metals that are necessary for advancing technologies that contribute to the green economy. These strategic metals are key to the manufacturing of military, consumer, electronic, and industrial products including batteries, specialty alloys, electrical conductors, catalytic converters, lasers, lenses, LED lights, and magnets. The approach proposed in the paper is to recover strategic metals from aqueous sources, where they are often considered contaminants, and avoid the deleterious environmental impacts of traditional hard rock mining. Geopolitical complexity will also be avoided, since these materials are currently sourced from only a few places in the world.

The 2021 Best Paper Award will be formally announced on the front cover and in an editorial in the September 2022 issue of ACS ES&T Engineering, which will be published in the upcoming September, 2022 edition. The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c07936